Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground — Summary

A petty clerk in Petersburg saves for months to buy a beaver collar. He borrows the money from his supervisor, signs a note for it, and loses two nights' sleep to the shame. He sells his old raccoon collar, buys black gloves instead of showy lemon-colored ones, and gets a shirt with bone studs to match. Then he walks out onto Nevsky Prospekt and shoulders into an officer.

That is the entire plan. He does not hit him or speak to him. He simply refuses to step aside. Years earlier the officer had taken him by the shoulders and set him out of the way, the way you move a chair out of a doorway, without looking at him. The clerk cannot swallow it, and it is not really the moving that stings. What stings is that nobody noticed him while it happened. When he finally collides with the man, after attempt number who knows what, he goes home and sings Italian arias, feeling like the winner. The officer almost certainly felt nothing at all.

Recognize the mechanism? I do, uncomfortably well. Not the beaver fur and not the boulevard, but the part where you turn an insult over for weeks that the other person forgot by that same evening. Dostoevsky wrote this man in 1864, and nobody has drawn him more precisely since.

This book goes after three questions, and all three land uncomfortably close to home. Why does all that self-examination paralyze us instead of helping? Why do we sometimes deliberately pick the thing that is bad for us? And why do we wreck exactly those moments when somebody finally gets close?

Who is speaking to you from underground

The speaker has no name. He is forty, a retired minor civil servant, living alone in a Petersburg tenement on a small inheritance that just barely covers him. His opening lines about himself: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." Then, in the next paragraph, he takes it back. He is not spiteful either. He never managed to be spiteful properly, or good, or a hero, or an insect. He could never be anything all the way through, and that is precisely his complaint.